Читать книгу The Threshold of Manifest Destiny - Laurel Clark Shire - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

Expansionist Domesticity and Settler Colonialism in Florida

In 1841 a young widow named Elizabeth Berry joined a group of white settlers that the U.S. Army deployed to recolonize north Florida. On August 17, Berry and her children, along with three other families and five single men, moved into blockhouses at Fort White. The U.S. military had constructed the fort in 1836 to protect a nearby settlement from Seminole attacks. By August 1841 the army had abandoned it, but military leaders hoped that installing white families there—the same kind of people the fort had been constructed to protect—would similarly discourage Seminole resistance. It was one of a dozen sites targeted by the army for reoccupation in the winter of 1841. By early 1842, however, the settlers had also deserted Fort White (one army officer blamed the whiskey trade), so Elizabeth Berry and her children moved again. For the second time, she found an opportunity for her family that also served national interests, and they settled near a former Seminole town at Chucochatti, where white settlers had made a successful colony with U.S. military support in February 1842.¹ Elizabeth Berry’s story illustrates that making homes in Florida was a political act carried out by white families supported by federal policies, and that white women were key actors in settler colonialism.

Prior to U.S. colonization, Florida was not an uninhabited frontier; it was a prosperous agricultural region where five thousand Native Americans and hundreds of Africans and their descendants lived. In 1823, an American trader visited Chucochatti and several other towns in the region northeast of Tampa Bay, where autonomous Seminoles and Black Seminoles (a group whose status varied from freedom to a form of slavery) had flourished since the mid-eighteenth century. They raised livestock, planted crops in the region’s fertile savannahs, and sold their excess produce on the Spanish colonial market. Two turbulent decades later, white families had taken over Chucochatti and much of the rest of Florida. Early in the Second U.S.-Seminole War, American forces burned it along with many other Seminole towns. Several years later soldiers escorted white settlers there, including a handful of widowed or single women like Elizabeth Berry. Many of these early settlers (male and female) filed for free land just after the war under a new homestead law called the Armed Occupation Act (AOA). By 1850 there were 604 whites and 324 enslaved blacks living at Chucochatti, and the region had been renamed Benton County in honor of pro-expansion Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, who had championed the new land law. Several waves of U.S. military, Indian, and welfare policies had wrested this productive corner of the continent from Native peoples and installed white families and enslaved blacks on it.²

At each stage of Florida’s transition from Seminole villages to American farmland, Americans mobilized white women like Berry to support their efforts. Such women provided material labor and cultural support for the growing American settlements in Florida. They represented national growth as the spread of domesticity and civilization and rationalized the violence of territorial expansion as the protection of white American women and their homes. American journalists, settlers, and politicians also told and retold stories that placed white women into threatened homesteads in Florida. “Indian depredation” narratives enabled white Americans to paint the territory as their home, where autonomous Native American and black people threatened their property. Within that rhetorical context, those who predated U.S. settlers in Florida became invaders, while white Americans, who took possession of already settled land, became the victims. Americans naturalized this startling reversal by using racialized notions of civilization and savagery in proximity to white women and children, who were always presumed to be vulnerable innocents. Thus stories about Seminole men’s attacks on white women relied on a highly gendered ideology of female vulnerability and domesticity to frame white frontier settlers as innocent homemakers, repurposing domesticity for Manifest Destiny. In this way, white women’s domestic work in Florida provided needed physical, material, and reproductive labor and served the fundamentally ideological process of claiming Florida as home to white Americans (many of them slave owners) and not home to Seminole and free black families and communities.

This book examines the central role that gender (masculinity and femininity as understood through domesticity) and race (particularly through white women) together played in the effort to turn Florida into an American place. In the period from 1821, when the United States acquired Florida from Spain, through the Second U.S.-Seminole War (1835–1842) and the decades beyond, American leaders and settlers used white men’s and women’s physical labor to create homes, farms, families, and communities. The colonization of Florida illustrates how gender ideology—domesticity as well as masculinity—abetted settler colonialism in the early nineteenth-century United States.

Settler Colonialism

As the first territory added after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and a frontier that attracted many white migrants in the 1820s, Florida was on the threshold of Manifest Destiny. One of several early experiments in expansion, the aggressive white colonization of Florida provided Americans with a place to test various cultural and political methods of supporting national growth. White settler colonization turned out to be the most effective method, supported by federal policies that granted land to white families.

Settler colonialism in North America began with European colonial ventures. It continued after 1783 in the early U.S. republic in the southern and midwestern borderlands that would become states such as Kentucky, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. While white settlement proceeded differently in each context, American settler colonialism shares much with European colonization elsewhere. In settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil, Europeans expanded their empires through the settlement of families—men and women—who created permanent, mixed societies in which whites dominated native peoples.³

In settler colonies, outsiders (white Europeans in many cases) invaded a place and used political, cultural, and economic structures to transform it into their space, turning themselves into its “natives.” Intending to stay permanently, settlers used legal and military methods to take and control the land. They also participated in a legal fiction that turned land into property that could be exclusively claimed by (white) individuals under colonial legal structures. Rather than claiming colonial space in the name of a monarch, however, settler colonists often declared their own sovereignty over the land. Many eventually asserted formal or informal independence from their empires of origin (as the United States did in 1776). The permanence of invading white settler families resulted in a perpetual conquest. While whites enjoyed land and citizenship in new territories, for the Native Americans coerced out of these lands, and the Mexicans and blacks denied basic rights and freedoms within them, U.S. expansion hardly felt like liberation. The settler/invaders never left, and indigenous survivors still live under colonial rule in settler societies, as Seminole and Mikasuki peoples do in Florida today.⁴

Unlike other kinds of imperial regimes, large numbers of women from the invading culture helped to colonize settler colonies, providing vital domestic and reproductive labor to create homes and reproduce white families and society. Settler women’s work was essential to colonial efforts to dispossess indigenous peoples because they created settlements that were both permanent and dominated by white cultural norms (albeit hybrid colonial ones, distinct from both European and indigenous North American cultures). Other than the presence of a large number of white women, settler colonies were similar to other colonies, and to varying degrees most combined the appropriation of Native land with resource extraction and forced labor.⁵

White settler colonialism in North America placed Native Americans and people of African descent in different positions. Settler societies shared what theorists call a “logic of elimination” regarding indigenous peoples. White settlers rendered land available to themselves by eliminating indigenous peoples; they engaged in violent campaigns to exterminate, assimilate, or segregate indigenous peoples who held prior claims to the space. By contrast, displaced populations of subordinated or enslaved people supplied the labor force needed to build a new society on that land and extract profit from it to benefit the white ruling class. The importation of an alienated and subaltern labor force was fully compatible with settler colonialism, as racial slavery was in the United States. Racial hierarchy arose from white settler colonies’ needs for land and labor, which relied on eliminating indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans.⁶

In the United States, settlers often began to unofficially colonize territory through passive, instead of active, expansionist policy. Rather than sending out settlers formally charged with civilizing conquered territory (although it eventually resorted to that in Florida), typically the U.S. government just failed to prevent settlers from squatting on lands in contact zones, and it later granted them preemption (the right to purchase land before auction) or even free public land. When, inevitably, violence erupted between white squatters and Native Americans, national leaders did not directly bear the burden of responsibility. Thus the government could rhetorically pursue peace with indigenous groups (or assimilation) even as its unofficial colonial army (white settler families) encroached on their lands. The young and cash-poor federal government slowly won more territory without having to officially declare simultaneous wars against all the indigenous peoples in its borderlands, and white settlers acquired more and more land through preemption and other generous federal land policies—policies framed as Jacksonian Free-Soilism, not imperialism. Of course, on many occasions violence between whites and Native Americans in frontier zones erupted to such a degree that the government had to intervene, usually when white encroachment had provoked Native resistance that resulted in the widely reported killing of white settler families. At such points, the U.S. military or state militias, sent to put down indigenous resistance, could be framed as protecting national borders and defending white women and children from the Native Americans, which conveniently made aggressive expansion look like defensive peacekeeping. Land recently wrested from Native Americans and (in the South) open to slavery was the tacit reward for aggressive, individualistic, entrepreneurial behavior. “Settler colonist” may sound more innocent than “imperialist invader,” but white settlers were far from harmless.⁷

Florida’s history produced a unique version of settler colonialism. Many groups had laid claim to Florida before 1821, so the territory that Americans acquired in 1821 was already home to European colonists, autonomous Native Americans, and free blacks. This mixed population made Americans extremely anxious about their southern border; these groups might ally with foreign empires, or each other, and invade the United States or launch an insurrection against American slavery. A brief summary of Florida’s past reveals who lived there on the eve of transfer to the United States in 1821, how these different constituencies provoked white American anxiety, and how each would either be coopted or driven out to make way for American settlers and their enslaved labor force in the decades that followed. White settler colonization, enabled by white women’s labor in multiple ways, represented a solution to the threat Americans believed Florida’s indigenous and colonial population posed.

Indigenous people had lived in Florida long before Europeans arrived there, but disease, warfare, and the slave trade devastated Florida’s first peoples between the 1500s and the 1700s. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, several groups came south to populate this recently emptied region and founded villages in the panhandle and in the interior of north central Florida. Whites began calling all the Native Americans in Florida the Florida Indians and the Seminoles in the late eighteenth century, but indigenous Floridians did not think of themselves as part of one group at that point. Some historians believe that the name Seminole originated from the Spanish word cimarron, meaning “runaway.” Others believe it derives from a Muscogee Creek word for wild plants and animals. By 1821 their settlements included at least five thousand Native American people as well as several hundred people of African descent. By the outbreak of the Second U.S.-Seminole War in 1835, the “Florida Indians” lived in four regional political communities—Apalachicola, Apalachee, Alachua, and Mikasuki—which were largely autonomous from each other. These groups were also distinct from the Muscogee Creeks (their nearest ancestral relatives) and Europeans. They were farmers and traders who understood kinship through matrilineal clans. Some of them claimed the tribute of enslaved black laborers, which granted them increased status, much as the labor of captives had enriched indigenous peoples in the Southeast for centuries.⁸

In addition to the indigenous people who lived there, there were also a few thousand people of European ancestry. Multiple European rulers had claimed Florida, an attractive territory due to its long coastlines and its strategic location between British and Spanish colonies, close to the Caribbean. The Spanish made the first permanent European settlement at St. Augustine in 1565. Its European population remained tiny (fewer than five thousand people), and by the mid-1700s Spain still exerted little authority outside of St. Augustine. At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 Great Britain claimed Florida, and most members of the small Spanish colonial population (approximately three thousand people) departed. The British combined part of Louisiana with Florida to create two provinces, East and West Florida, and designated capitals at St. Augustine and Pensacola. The British hoped to encourage the development of profitable plantations in the Floridas and pursued peaceful relations with Native American groups to stabilize them. British colonist Andrew Turnbull, for example, recruited 1,403 Mediterranean laborers (mainly from Minorca) in 1767–1768 to work on his sugar plantation at New Smyrna. Turnbull’s experiment with European contract workers failed when disease, grueling labor, violent overseers, and indigenous attacks killed nearly half of them, and the survivors abandoned the plantation in 1777. In St. Augustine the colonial government gave them land. By 1786, their families made up half of the population of St. Augustine and over 70 percent of its white population, because these contract laborers became “white” there, as in other colonies where there were few Europeans and many people of indigenous and African ancestry. Few other British planters were permanently successful, and although Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution added to British Florida’s colonial population, most of Florida remained beyond European authority during the British period. Twenty years later, at the end of the American Revolution, East and West Florida returned to Spanish rule, and many of the British colonists evacuated. As the nineteenth century began, Napoleon occupied Spain, weakening it and opening its empire up to nationalist revolutions, which soon spread across South and Central America. Spain therefore had few resources to invest in controlling Florida. As a result, throughout the Second Spanish period (1783–1819), populations of autonomous Native and black people controlled parts of East and West Florida.⁹

There was a significant population of free blacks in Florida because its tenuous position as a barely fortified outpost of the Spanish empire had encouraged liberal immigration policies toward nonwhites since the First Spanish Period. Spain had welcomed runaway slaves and granted them freedom if they converted to Catholicism, swore loyalty to Spain, and helped protect Florida. The Spanish Crown also encouraged slave owners to manumit their slaves and incorporate them into a three-caste society of whites, free blacks, and enslaved blacks. This system allowed individuals to become free so as to discourage a collective uprising of enslaved people. Black and mixed-race residents of Spanish Florida participated in its social and economic life, and the Spanish governor of Florida sent hundreds of them to build and to occupy a fort two miles north of St. Augustine in 1738. Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, became the first free black town in North America sanctioned by a European power.¹⁰

In addition to the free blacks who lived among European colonists, in the early nineteenth century there were five hundred or more blacks (called estelusti by the indigenous people) living among the Native peoples of Florida. Some were runaways or their descendants who had escaped slavery sometime in the past two centuries, while others came into Seminole towns through the trade in enslaved people. They occupied and could move between several different social roles, including spouse, adopted kin, ally, and tributary slave. The Seminoles did not categorically treat enslaved blacks as chattel property. Some of the Black Seminoles, whom elite Seminoles inherited, purchased, or gave as gifts, were treated as property. However, unlike enslaved blacks among American whites, the estelusti lived with their own families in Seminole villages or in four separate, but allied, towns where they elected their own leaders, owned property, carried weapons, and chose their own spouses. If they desired to acculturate fully into Seminole society, blacks might do so through intermarriage or even adoption into a clan. The black towns, like all other Seminole and Creek towns, gave tribute and military alliance to the leaders of their mother towns, in exchange for which they received protection and trade privileges. Since Creek and Seminole towns were highly autonomous, having separate towns actually made the estelusti more like Seminoles and Creeks. In other ways the Black Seminoles maintained their own culture, practicing Christianity and speaking their own language (as well as English and indigenous languages), but they shared with Seminoles similar agricultural and building methods, clothing styles, some religious practices, and very clear political and military interests. The Second U.S.-Seminole War solidified their alliance due to their common interest in defeating the Americans so that the Seminoles might retain their lands and the Black Seminoles their freedom. Though contemporary whites were concerned about the status of the “Indian negroes” in Florida, the Seminoles were not preoccupied about it. Kinship ties as part of clans or extended families, not status as black, white, or Indian, were the most important categorization for them, at least in the early nineteenth century. Native Floridians thus challenged slavery organized by race even as they practiced a form of it.¹¹

Much to the displeasure of American slaveholders, no single regime dominated outside of St. Augustine and Pensacola in the early nineteenth century, and Spain’s weak presence left autonomous Native Americans and blacks in the Floridas free to ally with the British, whom the United States was already fighting on its northern frontier in the 1810s. Florida’s mixed population also made American slaveholders very nervous. These anxieties drove repeated U.S. invasions of Florida in the 1810s. The Americans lacked a viable legal reason to intervene in Spanish territory, however, and had to withdraw after each invasion prior to 1818, leaving Florida outside of American control. That changed in early 1818 when Andrew Jackson, using reports of “Indian depredations” on white settlers along the Florida-Georgia border as an excuse, led a large American military force (composed of regulars, volunteers, and Lower Creek warriors) into Florida, destroying indigenous villages throughout Middle Florida and capturing thousands of cattle and hundreds of bushels of corn. The Americans began the First U.S.-Seminole War in cultural terms that would become even more familiar in the next twenty years. Cloaking expansionist aggression as self-defense, Jackson justified his actions as vengeance for the deaths of white women and children even as he targeted Seminole homes and families. He defended the invasion as vital to American national interests, since Spain had failed to rid the southeastern borderlands of threats to U.S. sovereignty by autonomous Native Americans, black runaways from slavery, and British agents who aided these groups. Although Jackson’s campaign was militarily successful, the Seminoles were too smart to engage his larger force, and most survived to fight another day. Nevertheless, Jackson had exposed Spain’s weakness. Treaty negotiations with Spain began in 1819 and Florida officially transferred to the United States in 1821. U.S. forces had finally claimed Florida, but it would take several more decades of war on its indigenous people, and white settler colonialism, before the Americans would fully control the territory.¹²

Due to its unique colonial and indigenous past and its location in the southern borderlands, Florida’s version of white settler colonialism differs from that in other contemporary U.S. territories. Much as U.S. economic forces influenced local economies in other Native North American communities, Americans quickly sought profits in Florida. Due to Florida’s location in the Southeast, however, the economic interests of slaveholders and land speculators prevailed over those of traders, and early U.S. policy toward Florida focused on removing the threats posed by autonomous Seminoles and free blacks rather than sustaining trade relationships. Thus American rule quickly marginalized the Seminole trade economy. Furthermore, while the expansion of market capitalism touched all American territories in the nineteenth century, the expansion of white settlement usually accompanied the spread of market capitalism in the borderlands. Yet large numbers of American squatters had not settled in Florida prior to 1821, making its colonization different from the process in many other early American frontier territories. While in Illinois and Georgia, for example, white squatters demanded violent federal efforts to remove indigenous residents in the 1830s in order to secure “their” property (in the Black Hawk War and the Cherokee Removal from Georgia), in Florida the impetus for the First U.S.-Seminole War, which finally forced Spain to cede Florida to the United States, came from slaveholders rather than squatters. Andrew Jackson obliged them and invaded Florida because doing so extended his anti-Indian campaign into Florida and removed the British-Seminole alliance that had threatened the United States during the War of 1812. After 1821 white settlers flooded into upper Florida, and land speculation was popular there; however, the Second U.S.-Seminole War—brought on by Jackson’s removal agenda in the 1830s—soon discouraged many potential immigrants. In response to the scarcity of immigrants, American leaders enacted several policies during and right after the Second U.S.-Seminole War to attract white settler families to the unsettled parts of Florida in order to pressure the Seminoles to leave. They made policies that enlisted white women in colonization in order to replicate the settlement process unfolding in other territories, realizing that war and removal alone could not accomplish the same colonial goal: permanent settlement.¹³

In other respects, Florida is similar to other American settler colonies built in former Spanish colonial borderlands. In Missouri, as in Florida, the United States removed Native Americans in the early nineteenth century as thousands of white settlers arrived there (with the enslaved laborers they claimed as property) hoping to gain some of the cheap or free public land on offer from the U.S. government. In Texas and New Mexico, lawmakers passed similar public land bills, hoping to attract white settler families as they had done in Florida. Compared to Texas and New Mexico, Florida’s southeastern coastal location and its population distinguish it, for it had far fewer white settlers than Texas did by the time of the 1836 rebellion, and a much smaller indigenous population than the New Mexico territory included when the Americans captured it (and the rest of Northern Mexico) in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–1848. Pro-settler land policies shaped the white colonization of all these places, and white settler women played an important role in the settler colonialism of all these states, even though their locations and demographics varied.¹⁴

Most settler colonies, including Florida and other U.S. states, justified imperial violence in the past and disavow it in the present through origin stories that frame settlement as natural, inevitable, or benevolent (for example, Manifest Destiny and the Thanksgiving story). Settler colonial accounts often cast particular imperial actors, such as the monarch, the metropolitan colonizer, and the ethnic cleanser, as the truly guilty parties, while they present settlers as persecuted migrants, refugees seeking asylum, or hardworking pioneers. In doing so, such accounts emphasize settlers’ hardships to justify their rewards, while downplaying their role in dispossessing Native peoples. In the United States, settler colonialism had to further distinguish itself from imperialism because the American Revolution left a legacy of anticolonial feelings. However, Americans did not reject colonizing new territory; they just called it something else—such as the spread of democracy. Their stories about territorial expansion sideline settler aggression toward indigenous peoples by focusing on the religious persecution or pioneering valor of the white settlers, who are the heroes and heroines of an inspiring story about overcoming adversity to bring civilization to the wilderness. The brave settlers’ sacrifices on the colonial frontier validate their entitlement to the land, which conveniently leaves indigenous peoples with prior claims outside of the main story. Settler stories intentionally marginalize the sustained legal and military battles that whites waged to claim Native land. When settler stories mention conflict with indigenous people, as in stories about Native attacks on white settlers, white narratives blame Native Americans for “bringing it on themselves” (by violently resisting white encroachment), and thus frame indigenous exile or death as the inevitable fate of “savages” who could not coexist with whites (eliding that it is wholly impossible to coexist with neighbors who want to remove or kill you).¹⁵

Although scholars rarely acknowledge it, the rhetorical frameworks that obscure imperial aggression in settler colonial origin stories often rely on gender. In Florida, female war refugees and hardy male farmers took center stage in the dramatic conflict between whites and Seminoles, and both of those images of Florida settlers helped to paint the naked aggression of Indian removal as a defensive policy to protect “peaceful” settler families. White women especially allowed American expansion into Florida to disappear as chivalrous defense, and at the same time settler narratives naturalized homemaking as woman’s duty rather than framing it as imperialist action.

Few scholarly overviews of settler colonial theory analyze gender or examine white women as colonizers. Some lack any gender analysis, while others examine white masculinity or the way colonial regimes targeted indigenous men and women differently. Those insights are important and valuable, but such accounts are incomplete because they do not include settler women and the ways that domestic work drove the political and geographic success of white settlements. As Margaret Jacobs notes, “We must move beyond merely adding (white) women to a simple narrative of heroic triumph over adversity.” Rather, settler women must be understood as colonizers who were simultaneously complicit with and subordinated by colonial regimes.¹⁶

There is a growing literature that fully incorporates women and gender, alongside race, class, and nation, in analyses of the colonial past. Many of these studies build on the insights of postcolonial theorist Ann Laura Stoler, who argues in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power that colonial regimes invaded intimate spaces and harnessed gender, race, and sexuality to their imperial mission. Margaret Jacobs’s White Mother to a Dark Race, Adele Perry’s On the Edge of Empire, and Lora Wildenthal’s German Women for Empire take up these “intimacies of empire” in settler colonies. These studies put gender and settler women at the center of the colonial encounter. They broaden theories of settler colonialism and challenge previous scholarship in women’s history that tended to romanticize settler women as pioneers rather than critically analyze white women as a colonizing force. In order to fully appreciate the role that white women played in imperial expansion, one must frame white female settlers’ labor in its colonial context and excavate the roots of the “white woman pioneer” in the narratives that settler societies tell in order to disavow their own imperial pasts. This book joins with these studies to hold white women accountable for their role in settler colonialism and the violence that inhered in it. It contributes to the literature on gender and settler colonialism by critically focusing on white women as actors in a settler colony. It further enriches and complicates settler colonial theory by illustrating how the racial “logic of elimination” intersected with gender: settler colonialism placed women of different races in different positions based on its need for particular kinds of labor as well as land. It depended on the domestic and reproductive power that American culture granted white women to make permanent settlements and to camouflage colonial violence. It also relied on the elimination of indigenous women and the matrilineal societies they reproduced through their children. Finally, white settlers depended on the reproductive and physical labor of enslaved black women, which made slavery profitable and sustainable. It targeted white, indigenous, and enslaved black women and their reproductive power in different ways in order to support settler colonialism.¹⁷

Due to the narratives that frame settler colonialism as innocent, it can be hard to recognize its imperialist essence. American exceptionalism—the notion that America was different and better than European empires—tends to further obscure this in the U.S. case. Previous generations of U.S. historians argued that the United States was never imperialist so long as its territorial acquisitions were contiguous annexations within the continent; but that argument no longer holds. Scholars of U.S. settler colonialism describe it as a violent imperial mode under which Indian removal and genocide laid the groundwork for subsequent U.S. foreign policy and imperialism. Diplomatic historians now recognize that various iterations of imperial ideology operated well before and after the era of the U.S.-Mexico War, from the expansionist logic among the founding generation of American leaders, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in particular, to the Latin American filibusters of the 1850s and to the U.S. occupation of Haiti, Cuba, and the Philippines in the 1890s.¹⁸

While histories of American settler colonialism usually include Florida, its significance in the development of U.S. expansionism has never been fully explored, in part due to the old myth that contiguous expansion was not imperialist. Historians also have overlooked it because the United States acquired it long before Manifest Destiny (the ideology that God intended for the growing population of white Americans to spread over all of North America, bringing Christianity, democracy, and capitalism to improve it) entered popular speech in the 1840s. The U.S. colonization of Florida began in the 1820s, as whites moved west into Missouri and other parts of the Louisiana Purchase, and at nearly the same moment that Moses Austin brought the first Anglo settlers into Mexican Tejas; thus Florida deserves as much recognition in the development of Manifest Destiny. If anything, the colonization of Florida and Missouri led the way, as both were already American territories by the time Cora Montgomery coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1839. Placing Florida into the history of national expansion before 1840 links settler colonialism to other forms of U.S. imperialism and stretches histories of Manifest Destiny back to its beginnings, well before the conflict over Texas and Northern Mexico crystallized Americans’ support for (or opposition to) national expansion.¹⁹

Florida is also left out of histories of U.S. expansion because of its location in the coastal Southeast far from the western frontier. Historians of the Spanish borderlands include Florida as a northern outpost of Spain’s empire, while many U.S. histories include Florida as part of the Old South, even though it was a relatively recent acquisition by the time it joined the Confederacy. Many historical accounts of expansion begin with the annexation of Texas in the mid-1840s and then follow expansion into the West, but Americans had set their sights on Spain’s holdings in North America long before that. In fact, Americans had wanted Florida since the revolution, when John Adams wrote a prototype treaty that demanded Europeans acknowledge the United States as the rightful successor to all of Britain’s North American colonies, including Canada, Bermuda, and Florida. Four decades later, when Adams’s son, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, negotiated the Transcontinental Treaty with Spanish diplomat Luis de Onís (ratified by Congress in 1821), he finally fulfilled his father’s wishes. In exchange for Florida the United States agreed to pay $5 million in claims that Americans held against Spain, and to concede Texas, which it had claimed (over Spanish and Mexican objections) as part of the Louisiana Purchase.²⁰

Expansionist Domesticity

As the border space between public and private, the threshold offers a useful metaphor for theorizing the gender history of American settler colonialism and the relationship between nineteenth-century nationalism and domesticity. As white women remade their homes in disputed borderlands, their domestic work crossed the threshold from private concern to public service—the settling up of the “public land.” As Catharine Beecher opined in her 1842 Treatise on Domestic Economy, one of American women’s most significant roles was to bring Christian domesticity to the wilderness, to install “an ark of civilization amid an ocean of foliage.” As Beecher and other adherents of such domestic ideology noted, as the nation expanded, virtuous and well-ordered households (created and sustained by white women) would ensure that new territories and states would become civilized places that supported republican democracy. This belief countered the anxiety that pioneers would “go native” when they encountered “uncivilized” places and societies, or that the peoples that an expanding America swallowed up would challenge American political and social order rather than assimilating into it. Although historians rarely link male political and military leaders to domestic ideology, some of the American national and military leaders in this study also believed that the presence of white women in new settlements would ensure that American virtues would spread outward. Women’s domestic roles as workers, mothers, wives, and mistresses required them to submit to patriarchal authority and to instill morality and patriotism in children; they therefore both upheld the patriarchal household model and supported the republic. Many Americans believed that white women were central to the spread of properly ordered households and civilization, just as other colonial regimes had cast European women as civilizing agents.²¹

As they made homes in Florida, white women established that it was part of the United States and home to Americans. The homemaking that they performed operated at both national and household levels, a dynamic I label “expansionist domesticity.” Americans rarely explicitly theorized or described this expansionist domesticity because most believed that domestic labor was the work that women naturally provided. Antebellum Americans viewed white women’s work in creating permanent settler colonies as their innate, God-given role and rarely commented on it. In historical accounts, white frontier women appear to do the same quotidian labor in a different place, with perhaps more difficulties, fewer comforts, and added loneliness. They seem to have little choice about whether to risk the rewards of frontier living. Yet, as this study shows, male and female migrants into Florida all relied on extended family and kinship networks in order to survive and thrive, in spite of the image of the single, independent male trailblazer favored in popular representations of the frontier. As subordinate partners to male settlers, women (and their labor) could be taken for granted; thus expansionist domesticity underwrote settlement policies and processes in unacknowledged ways. Hence women, even white women, are frequently marginalized or absent from histories of expansion and settler colonialism. Similarly, histories of women and domestic work often remain limited to the world within households, even though territorial expansion regularly counted on women’s willingness to cross the threshold and make new homes in contested places.

The continuing assumption that territorial expansion was men’s work arises both from the public/private dichotomy that shaped domestic ideology and from ideas about dependence and independence embedded in the antebellum social order. Most Americans, across regional variations, presumed that white men were independent, chivalrous, and responsible for their dependents—women, children, servants, and slaves. The white patriarch derived his power from his position as the independent household head to whom all his dependents owed their labor and loyalty. This patriarchal household social order was central to the framework that policy makers used in Florida. Their policies aimed to restore women and men to their natural roles, a restoration that they equated with the settlement of the frontier. In return, white women benefited from national expansion and were at least complicit with its violence, whether or not they consciously invested themselves in the ideological project of expansionist domesticity. Their dependence limited women’s choices and makes it very difficult to locate their agency in history, but because of their role and privilege in national expansion, white women must be considered central actors in accounts of U.S. expansion. While several historians have found that white women often resisted frontier migration, studies such as this one reveal that the work women did once they arrived was no less significant to the expansion of slavery and national territory. In fact, that men compelled white women to go should highlight just how important their presence and labor were to those who brought them (sometimes against their wishes) to Florida and other settler colonies.²²

Rather than accepting the framing of settler women’s domestic work as innocent or even patriotic, we must recognize that white women, like men, were invaders who the nation rewarded for their work along U.S. frontiers, where they effectively expanded the territory upon which their whiteness would grant them a range of privileges based on their alleged superiority to Native Americans and people of African descent. That white women’s work was gendered and cast as subordinate to white men’s makes it no less significant in the cooperative racial project that was American expansion in the early nineteenth century. In fact, that subordination was part of its significance.

In spite of the ways that nineteenth-century domesticity obscured their significance, white women’s lives are reflected in historical records from the Florida frontier; such records even include white women of modest means who did not leave behind journals or extensive correspondence. Land and court records, public and private accounts of territorial Florida, and military and federal policy papers all illuminate the ways their physical labor and symbolic value underwrote American settler colonialism in Florida.

This book approaches the history of white women in Florida differently than many other books on antebellum women. The “cult of domesticity” and its prescriptive notion that women and men occupied separate spheres of influence in the nineteenth-century United States has been a longstanding feature of U.S. women’s history. Rather than measuring their political significance by the reform movements they championed or the political parties they supported, this book recognizes, first, that making homes in territorial Florida was a political act even if women were not conscious of it. Women’s domestic work had national meanings in the context of territorial and slavery expansion. Second, it suggests that southern white women were not only plantation mistresses or farm wives, but they were also settlers who brought slavery as well as white homes into Indian country. Third, it includes men and masculinity as part of the domestic realm, since almost all households contained both men and women, and because gender ideology relied on the pairing of masculinity and femininity—in oppositional, complementary, and heteronormative ways.²³

Another implication of this study is that domesticity was not only an ideological construct that shaped national expansion, it was also a material part of the process of Americanizing new spaces. In frontier Florida, white women used their labor (and that of any enslaved people they exploited), household furniture, and kitchen utensils to make new homes and benefited in material ways because they did so. Here this study takes some cues from socialist feminists, who have long recognized the material importance of domestic ideology. Historically this ideology purported that women did not work but “helped”; that women were especially suited for housework or trades that replicated household skills (work always deemed unskilled regardless of its degree of difficulty, and, therefore, always paid less than “skilled” male labor); and that “love” rather than money, independence, or status was the best and most appropriate reward for female work. In this regard, Americans treated women’s work for settlement as they did the rest of their labor. It was vital to the reproduction and survival of society but completely discounted as work. Unlike women’s domestic work elsewhere, however, their labor on frontiers supported not only their households and the growth of the middle class and modern capitalism but also the expansion of national territory—support that looked apolitical given women’s natural role as “helpers.” This book categorizes and analyzes women’s labor in frontier homesteads as work—domestic and nationalist work—and establishes that white women were important and complicit members of white settler colonies that spread slavery, ended the liberty of free blacks in Florida, dispossessed Native Americans, and attempted to destroy indigenous societies via assimilation, extermination, and removal.²⁴

Since this book’s central claims about the significance of women’s labor depend upon a multifaceted definition of domesticity, the book owes a great debt to scholarship on the antebellum “culture of sentiment.” In particular, critic Amy Kaplan has argued that territorial expansion and domestic ideology were partners in a nationalist project that she named “Manifest Domesticity.” In Kaplan’s view, proponents of domesticity used expansion to give women’s domestic literature national and imperial importance. This study expands upon her work to illustrate how proponents of expansion mobilized domesticity in the service of settler colonialism and Manifest Destiny. In Florida, national and military forces mobilized matters typically confined to women’s history—domesticity, married women’s property law, gender roles—to justify Indian removal, to spread slavery, and to propel territorial expansion via white settlement. Using the tools of social and political history, this book confirms what Kaplan observed in women’s domestic literature—that at times the domestic ideal, rather than dividing women and men into separate spheres, united white American men and women around national expansion.²⁵

This study also draws upon the vibrant scholarship that analyzes U.S. expansion in cultural history. These scholars have bridged histories of U.S. imperialism with studies of American visual and literary culture, showing that culture not only reflected foreign policy concerns but also helped to shape policy. This study asks not only how U.S. policies in territorial Florida shaped and reflected domestic ideology and cultural beliefs about women but also how those policies affected female historical actors who, in turn, sometimes renegotiated such ideologies and beliefs. It moves beyond texts to consider how expansionist domesticity also operated on a political and geographical stage.²⁶

As with settler colonial studies, when histories of national expansion have explored its gendered ideological and material consequences, they have emphasized the ways that white masculinity influenced American foreign policy and imperialism. And for good reason: the idea of martial manhood popular among many nineteenth-century Americans celebrated male exploits in wars fought for territory and framed them as noble violence aimed at the spread of democracy or the defense of women and children. Nevertheless, this important focus on masculinity has overshadowed an equally compelling history of women and femininity. Indeed, only a few studies have looked for women’s roles in national expansion. Unlike previous studies, this book does not suggest that women’s role was solely oppositional or subordinate to expansionist men. Rather, as whites, white women had much to gain from expansionist policies and actively sought those gains for themselves and their households. In doing so, white women undertook particularly female tasks on behalf of territorial expansion and shared the benefits with white men. Moreover, white women who profitably settled the frontier succeeded for the same reasons men did. The male and female settlers most likely to plant permanent roots and prosper in Florida had usually settled near relatives. In extended families, as in domestic relations, men and women were interdependent.²⁷

White women were central to U.S. national expansion and its ideological justifications and effects: they symbolized civilized domesticity, expended the labor that turned frontier dwellings into permanent homes, and gave birth to the next generation of whites in Florida, people who would claim to be its “natives.” In this study, then, white women take center stage to highlight their role in American settler colonialism and to emphasize the ways in which white domesticity privileged them and provided essential service to national expansion. The homes that white women built in territorial Florida were the building blocks of a colonial regime that dispossessed Native Americans, as well as places in which people lived under the deeply unequal relations of racial slavery.

Race and the Domestication of U.S. Florida

The gender dynamics of American expansion cannot be separated from the racial projects under way in territorial Florida. The colonization of Florida unfolded as Americans in general began to change their perceptions of Native Americans. Whites viewed people of African descent as irredeemably different from whites, but they had long seen indigenous difference as rooted in environment rather than race. For most Americans before about 1830, Native American “savagery” was a problem that could be solved by “civilization” or assimilation programs, and U.S. Indian policy, at least rhetorically, had reflected this attitude. After 1830 that view began to change, and many white Americans (except for a few Christian missionaries) began to think of “Indians” as a distinct race that would never achieve the same level of civilization as whites or live comfortably among them, in spite of the many examples of indigenous people who did just that. Not only did whites increasingly view Indians as racially distinct and incapable of assimilating but the alliance and occasional kinship between blacks and Seminoles in Florida further inflamed anti-Indian sentiment there.²⁸

As white Americans increasingly invested race with immutable meaning, U.S. rule brought a changing racial regime to Florida. American racial systems built on earlier Spanish and British colonial models, and racial categories outside American settlements were somewhat in flux in the early nineteenth century. Florida’s middle ground, however, was eroding quickly (along with many others in North America at the end of the Wars of the 1810s), as it became a U.S. territory in which the Native peoples lacked European allies. In the 1820s and 1830s, white settlers began to reproduce the inequalities of patriarchal white supremacy as they settled in Florida, and Seminole and Black Seminole people fought to maintain their land and autonomy. The values attached to differences in skin tone and culture increasingly conformed to the American model, in which the most significant distinctions were between whites (whether of Spanish, English, or other European descent); Native Americans, increasingly cast as undifferentiated “Seminoles” (who Americans believed must be removed); and blacks (who Americans believed must be enslaved). Americans imposed these racial categories in Florida through racial slavery, via the privileging of whites, and in its diplomacy with Native Americans. People of mixed European, African, and/or Native American ancestry would find it much more difficult to maintain their rights and property in U.S. Florida than they had under Spain.²⁹

The labor of enslaved people—forced by threat of violence and a dehumanizing racial regime—was central to the creation of white American homes, wealth, and identity in Florida. While the estelusti fought alongside their Seminole allies to remain free, enslaved blacks found themselves separated from families and communities and sold or sent to Florida to toil in cotton, sugar, or indigo fields. The number of enslaved people in Florida had already swelled to 15,501 by 1830 and then nearly quadrupled to 61,745 by 1860. Free blacks living in former Spanish colonial towns faced increasing harassment and discrimination after 1821.³⁰ Meanwhile, white settlers were granted citizenship and property rights, rations, protection, transportation, housing, and cheap or even free land if they helped colonize Florida.

Americans also created a single category of indigenous identity so that all those deemed Indians in Florida could be removed. American negotiators in the 1820s and 1830s regarded Florida’s separate bands of Native American peoples as one group, because doing so allowed them to make treaties that (from a U.S. perspective) conveniently bound all of them to one agreement. From a Native American perspective, however, there was no such group or council that could make decisions for all Native people in Florida. In fact, a unified political and cultural “Seminole” identity only solidified in indigenous resistance to American demands, especially in the three wars they fought against U.S. forces. The “Black Seminoles” experienced their own parallel but distinct ethnogenesis in the same conflicts, as they fought to maintain their freedom. U.S.-Seminole diplomacy and conflict thus created new Black Seminole and Indian identities even as they sought to eliminate them.³¹

The absence of a captive trade in Florida also influenced the shift toward American racial hierarchy. By the 1820s the Seminoles were not taking many white captives, for there was no market for them. This made nineteenth-century Florida a far different place—with fundamentally dissimilar relationships between whites, Native Americans, and blacks—than other Spanish borderlands in the early nineteenth century. The captive trade in Pueblo, Plains, Cherokee, and other borderland societies, which continued in the West into the nineteenth century, challenged traditional Native kinship and integrated Native communities into larger capitalist economies there. Intermarriage via captive taking also forged kin connections between imperial settlers and Native Americans in such borderlands, but not in Florida. In the main, the Seminoles viewed whites as enemies and not potential kin, especially since there were plenty of runaway slaves available for adoption as kin or tributary slaves. Instead of taking and trading in white captives, the Seminoles attacked homesteads in order to discourage white migration into Florida. As a result of settler colonialism and the conflicts it produced, whites and Native peoples in Florida increasingly saw each other as fundamentally different.³²

White Settlers and Ethnic Cleansing

Between the First and Second U.S.-Seminole Wars, the United States signed three treaties with “the Florida Indians.” U.S. agents negotiated these agreements in the 1820s and 1830s as white families moved into Florida. American Indian agents conducted these treaties, like almost all U.S.-Indian diplomacy, with a bare modicum of honesty, mostly to create plausible but thin arguments that they were valid. Indigenous people in Florida resisted making and complying with each of these treaties. The first one established reservations for Native Americans in the Florida territory, but subsequent documents created a series of impossible and escalating demands on the Seminoles, in particular for land, for the return of the Black Seminoles whom Americans termed runaway slaves, and for Seminole reunification with the Creeks (by now their enemies) on a shared reserve west of the Mississippi River. White Americans were determined to end the freedom that the Seminoles offered runaways and to reclaim their “property” among the Black Seminoles.³³ Chapter 1 analyzes how international treaty law endowed white settler women with separate marital property rights in this period, even as American law also limited the rights of free blacks and shored up racial slavery.

Table 1. Florida Population by Race and Enslavement, 1830–1860

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedules, Florida, 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860, in Social Explorer Dataset, Census 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860 [database online].

^a Includes one “Indian.”

As in many settler colonies, white colonization happened in tandem with Indian removal and the expansion of slavery into Florida. The American population increased quickly after 1821, from a total of 34,730 in 1830 (the date of the first U.S. census of Florida) to 87,445 in 1850. By 1850, migrants from other states comprised over half (56.1 percent) of the free, native-born population in Florida. In that same period, the indigenous population of Florida dropped dramatically, from about five thousand to fewer than four hundred. Many of the whites who settled Florida were slaveholders, and Florida’s growing population included nearly equal numbers of whites and enslaved blacks (Table 1). Migrants also built other institutions that nineteenth-century whites associated with civilization: Protestant churches, schools for free white children, and newspapers.³⁴

Intending to stay permanently and hoping to become wealthy planters using enslaved labor, the white settler population concentrated in the middle of upper Florida and increasingly limited the rights of free blacks (Table 2). By 1840 over half of Florida’s population resided in the region between the Suwanee and Apalachicola Rivers. Attracted by rich agricultural land, whites eagerly flocked to the area, laying out the new state capital Tallahassee in 1824. Middle Florida whites held disproportionately high numbers of slaves, nearly half of all the slaves in Florida in 1830 and more than half of the total in 1840. As slavery increased, the number of free blacks fell (and many fled the territory), especially in Middle Florida.³⁵

Map 1. Florida, 1821–1845.

U.S.-Seminole diplomacy in the 1820s and 1830s culminated in a highly disputed 1833 agreement that the Seminoles would return runaway slaves and move to the Creek reservation in the western Indian Territory by 1835. Those who lived in upper Florida—closest to the whites moving into Middle Florida and already facing violence—capitulated and left in 1834. Elsewhere, especially in East Florida, cycles of borderland violence renewed between indigenous residents and white settlers. These rising tensions erupted into war in late 1835. In November, resistant Seminoles killed Charley Emathla, a Seminole who was cooperating with removal. In late December a band of Seminoles ambushed American soldiers as they traveled between Fort Brooke and Fort King (Tampa and Ocala). On the same day, Seminole warriors killed the Indian agent at Fort King. In retaliation, President Jackson ordered U.S. forces to invade a Seminole stronghold on the Withlacoochee River. These events formally started the Second U.S-Seminole War.³⁶

Table 2. Florida Population by Most Populated Regions, Race, and Enslavement, 1830–1860

Notes: In 1830 Middle Florida included Gadsden, Hamilton, Jefferson, Leon, and Madison counties; for 1840 data Franklin County was added, it was carved out of Gadsden County in 1832. This table does not include the sparsely populated South Florida region (Indian lands, Mosquito and Monroe Counties) as part of East Florida although they had been included in the British Province of East Florida. U.S. Census, Florida, 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860 in Social Explorer Dataset, Census 1830, 1840, 1850 and 1860 [database online].

^a Includes one “Indian.”

In the ethnic cleansing campaign that whites called the Second Seminole War, many Seminoles died from starvation, violence, or disease, but their resolve to remain in Florida fiercely challenged their Americans foes. Determined to remain independent and in Florida, but fewer in number and resources than the Americans, the Seminoles fought an effective guerilla war for nearly seven years from December 1835 until August 1842. The United States spent more than $30 million (far more than planned for the removal of all indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi) and sent nearly 1,500 white men to their deaths in Florida during this conflict. The Florida War, as the American press called this conflict at the time, lasted much longer than anticipated, cost more money than any other U.S. war with Native Americans before or since, and resulted in the loss of more American soldiers than any other U.S. war against an indigenous nation. The U.S. military removed about 4,400 indigenous people (including nearly five hundred Black Seminoles) during the Second U.S.-Seminole War.³⁷

Most of the military action occurred between the Withlacoochee River and Lake Okeechobee, a region stretching 150 miles across central Florida. That region contained white homesteads as well as Seminole villages, and therefore women and children from both indigenous and white communities were on the front lines. Throughout the war, the U.S. Army attacked Seminole villages, where they killed and captured people and burned homes, goods, and fields. The Seminoles retaliated in kind, attacked troops or white settlers, and then disappeared into Florida’s vast coastal plains and swamps where American forces struggled to even locate them. By its second year, the war appeared to be a hopeless effort that Americans, in the context of the economic panic that began in 1837, could not afford to keep funding. Critics did not, however, voice any opposition to the war’s aims—just to President Jackson’s failure to achieve them.³⁸

Critics of the Florida War expressed little sympathy for the Seminoles because, in the 1830s, Indian depredation narratives emerged in the American press, framing the conflict as a war to protect white women and children from “savages” and “barbarians,” in spite of the fact that American forces resorted to the same strategy of attacking Seminole homes and families. Chapter 2 examines those stories, the version of this history that has dominated prior written accounts, and their effects on American policy. Chapter 3 features Seminole accounts of the war and their removal from Florida, a perspective that confirms some aspects of white American accounts but challenges their framing of the conflict. Many whites, fearful of Indian depredations, fled to other states or to military garrisons in 1835 and 1836. Desperate to keep them from abandoning Florida, Congress responded in 1836 by ordering the army to supply rations to any white families, widows, and orphans who stayed in the territory. Chapter 4 analyzes this wartime welfare program.³⁹

Although they were essential to white settlements, white women were scarce in territorial Florida, a problem that American leaders would seek to remedy. In 1830 and 1840 Florida had more white adult men and fewer adult white women than national averages. While Florida’s enslaved population had a balanced gender ratio and an average age near the national norm, its white population skewed male and its white female population skewed young. If U.S. leaders wanted to populate Florida with white families, they would have to find ways to change this, given the importance of available reproductive-age wives to family formation and white settler colonialism. The influx of white soldiers and the flight of some white women out of the territory during the Second U.S.-Seminole War increased the white gender and age imbalances. In 1840, there were almost twice as many white men in the territory as white women. Furthermore, the enslaved population continued to grow with nearly equal numbers of males and females, so that by 1840 enslaved black women outnumbered white women. As Chapters 4 and 5 reveal, American leaders enacted supportive family settlement policies in the early 1840s as they ended the Second U.S.-Seminole War. As a result, gender ratios among white adults began to equalize. In 1850 the white gender ratio was 1.3 men for every white adult woman (as compared to 1.74 in 1840). By 1860, it approached parity (1.18). As soldiers departed, new white families arrived or formed and white women produced more children. In fact, in addition to migration (voluntary and coerced) and in spite of the relative scarcity of white adult women, reproduction boosted Florida’s population in these years. Children under the age of fifteen made up 41–45 percent of the total population in the decades after 1821, and by 1850 Florida had proportionally more white children than the national average and roughly the same percentage of enslaved children (see Appendix).⁴⁰

American leaders created these policies aimed at retaining and increasing adult white female settlers in Florida even as they sought to remove Seminole families. U.S. forces finally broke the fierce Seminole resistance about five years into the war brought on by the U.S. Indian removal policy. Determined to fracture their alliance, U.S. Brigadier General Thomas Jesup offered the Black Seminoles a deal in 1837. Against white southerners’ wishes, Jesup promised them freedom if they agreed to surrender and leave Florida. This gave them an alternative path to liberty and manipulated them into aiding the Americans. As one of their descendants recalled, “They all went together to leave Florida to Oklahoma…. You know that they had to do something to be free.”⁴¹ In addition to the loss of their Black Seminole allies, the Seminoles lost the war because they ran out of resources and safe places to live. They were rarely routed on the battlefield, but deprivation led many to surrender between 1837 and 1841, while American forces captured others. After their capture or surrender, American military escorts imprisoned the Seminoles at a fort where they waited, sometimes for months, for the steamboats that would take them west. By 1841, most of the Seminoles had been sent west to the Creek Indian Territory. Some Black Seminoles went with them, while others aided U.S. forces in exchange for their freedom. After removal, Black Seminoles found little safety from slavery in Indian Territory, and some traveled further south into Texas and Mexico in search of secure freedom.⁴²

In 1841 American military leaders also began to recruit white settler families to reoccupy the frontier. Military leaders believed that white recolonization would induce the remaining Seminoles to surrender. As an incentive to reestablish settlements at abandoned forts, plantations, and farms, the army provided white settler families with rations, transportation, and temporary homes. The white women who participated in this colonization scheme are featured in Chapter 4. Congress passed a bill that awarded free public land to armed white settlers in Florida just as the war ended in late summer 1842. This new law rewarded whites who inhabited and cultivated Florida farms (south of the existing line of settlement) for five years. Chapter 5 highlights the gendered ways in which white settler families operated as armed occupiers under this law.⁴³

Ultimately, the U.S. Army never managed to rid Florida of Seminoles completely or to capture all the Black Seminoles and return them to slavery. Several hundred Seminoles remained on an informal reservation in southwest Florida after 1842, distant from white settlements. Nationalists and other proponents of aggressive expansionism found little to celebrate in the Second U.S.-Seminole War and far more to commemorate in the U.S.-Mexico War, which began four years later. This is another reason why histories of Manifest Destiny sideline Florida. The U.S.-Seminole wars, especially the long and bloody Second U.S.-Seminole War, brought more shame than praise to the American military and government. The war with Mexico, by contrast, was relatively quick and gloriously successful, making it a more favorable context for celebrating national expansion.⁴⁴

As the history of early U.S. Florida reveals, women’s history is not separate from histories of war, expansion, slavery, colonialism, and politics. Domestic ideology influenced not only women’s lives but also the development of American nationalism and territorial expansion. In the chapters that follow, it will become clear that in political speech, popular representations, and federal and military policy, white women and their domestic labor played an important role in how Americans made Florida part of the United States. Some white women found opportunities on the Florida frontier that were not available to women elsewhere in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their gains, however, came at a high cost for indigenous and black peoples in Florida.